Appropriated Territories 15 07–01 08 2013

Published on Thursday, 02 February 2017 21:35

Exhibition “Appropriated Territories”, was organized in the context of Thom Mann festival. The festivals theme – “In Search for Homeland” – was inspired by the book by Czesław Miłosz. Thom Mann along with Czesław Miłosz are two world-renowned writers, a German and a Polish, that have worked and lived in Lithuania in their time (Thom Mann has spent a few summers in Nida, while Czesław Miłosz as a child lived in the northern part of Lithuania). Both of them loved their homeland, but given the politic circumstances, their rapport with their homeland was a problematic one.

Exhibition adresses all of the surrounding contexts – that of the nature, the culture-political, the artistic-creative, with an attempt to find some uniting threads. The main subject of the exhibition is so called “homeland” – a territory that we perceive, feel and define as ours. “Home” might be a cosy nest as well as gigantic political constructs, such as the state, even the communities as those of soccer fans, or scientific truths that give us the feeling of security.

The defense of ones own territory is more often than not binded with conflict – it might be football fan riot, a scandal between the neighbors, scientific dispute or wars consuming human lives. This exhibition gives a sort of a transparent insight to the creation of the territories, their attacks and their defense.

The exhibition is not about concrete “homelands” or self-identification with them, it is dedicated to the mechanisms that create “homelands”, the mosaics that they generate and their reciprocal processes.

Curator Eglė Mikalajūnė